You're probably being downvoted for off-topicness, FYI, since this comment is equally germane to any mention of Go. That said, I feel it is a comment in good faith and deserves an answer.
Question #1: How invested should you model Google as being in Go's future? Answer: Extraordinarily invested. They have a whole lot of code written in it, most of which the world will never hear about, and which powers services that they will continue running until the sun goes nova. Google will likely continue maintaining and extending Go programs (as well as C++, Java, and Python) for the foreseeable future.
Question #2: Can Go survive without Google's corporate backing? Answer: Go is an OSS project. Like many OSS projects, it receives a substantial amount of support from corporate interests. Go is not uniquely a Google priority -- many organizations like having a systems programming language which has its feature set. In the absence of meaningful support from Google, Go code existing as of August 2015 would continue to function. Further versions of the language/toolchain/etc would have substantial question marks about them, but the community feels large enough that this would be a Significant Event rather than a death knell.
I'm not sure if this will help me. I guess I'm in a programmer midlife crisis. Every new thing is potentially a waste of time because you can't predict if it is still around in 2 years. And with Google you know that they invest millions of dollars in projects and then abandon them.
Would I be better off maintaining decade old COBOL projects? Sometimes I think so. Other times I'm glad I can chose the technology I want to solve the problems at work.
You can never stop learning. Go is my current 'thing', at least for personal projects. But who knows what the landscape will be like in 5 years or 10.
For a while I though Haskell was the most awesome thing. Good Haskell code has a timeless quality to it (in a couple senses of the word). But I found adapting my thinking to it difficult, and it wasn't likely to be something I'd use at work then or now.
It is absolutely not a community project. Go governance is a 100% @ Google . There is no go committee or go working group outside Google. It's backed by one company that has full control over it. Sure it's open-source, but good luck with a fork. How can anybody be so misleading about that fact ? What did make you think Go is a "community project" ?
> but that does not mean it depends on Google.
There is a top down , vertical relationship between the Go team at Google and the rest of Go users, Go main goal is to fulfill the Go team needs, period. If you find it useful then it's a bonus. That's exactly how the Go team speaks and act, in fact the Go team makes it really hard to contribute to the core.
Please, stop saying what you say, it is completely untrue and a total mis-characterization of how the Go project work.
I still want to know what made you think Go is a "community project".
I still want to know what made you think Go is a "community project".
Well, the main developers do listen to the community.
Any project can fork, if there are enough people who are very dissatisfied with the current management.
I'm not aware of any serious grumblings about such a fork though. Why?
The core team is very good, and very narrowly focused. They've communicated clearly on nearly every issue as to what they're doing, and why. It seems clear that they are intent on making the best possible tool that fits with their particular vision. There are people who agree with this vision, and broadly support their efforts. And then there are people who really don't like their vision, and wander off to use Rust or something else.
The core team has enormous respect from the existing golang community. If Google suddenly laid off the developers (or just switched them to something else) or otherwise dramatically changed direction in their support for the project, the community would move in quickly to help out the situation.
I could see people getting together to form a non-profit foundation that could at least pay for a few guys to continue to work on Go full-time. But currently, there is no apparent need, so it hasn't been done. Google is willing to pay substantially for the development, and I don't see gophers complaining about that.
> I could see people getting together to form a non-profit foundation that could at least pay for a few guys to continue to work on Go full-time.
It's not going to happen, for the same reason the biggest startups in the Silicon Valley never came together to write their own language before. Let's get things straight, the only people who control Go is the Go team period. You are not talking about facts, so i'm not sure what is the point of your comment.
The point I was trying to make is that the golang community has a lot of respect for the current core team. If the community didn't have that respect, then I speculate that there would be a fork (or takeover), and it would then look more like the kind of community-controlled project that you seem to prefer.
This kind of thing has happened in the past: XFree86, OpenOffice, gcc, etc.
